MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The bride might have been tipped off on the honeymoon: The newlyweds went to the Smoky Mountains, where they slept in separate tents. Then there was the husband’s complaint about her weight. Antoinette Walters Janda said she lost 65 pounds to be more appealing to her husband, Jiri Janda. But he still did not make love to her.

Her complaint, spelled out in court testimony, led a state appeals court Friday to annul the Jandas’ sexless marriage. The decision means the husband, a Czech citizen, could lose his permanent resident status under U.S. immigration laws and be deported.

According to the court record, Jiri Janda came to the United States in 2001 on a temporary green card. The couple married on June 5, 2005, after a courtship of a few months. The record did not say how old they were.

Antoinette Janda, who is American, filed for an annulment on Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day — claiming that her husband had married her without ever intending to engage in marital intercourse.

Jiri Janda testified that he was truly unhappy with his wife’s weight, but he also offered other reasons for the unusual relationship, saying she was messy and her personality had changed after a hysterectomy.

He said he sought a divorce rather than an annulment because that might allow him to remain in the United States. The 5-0 decision of the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals upholds a lower court ruling siding with her.

“An unstated intent, held at the time of the marriage ceremony, to utterly refuse to engage in a sexual relationship with the other party is a fraud that alters the very essence of the marriage,” the court said.

Jiri Janda’s attorney, James Lambert, said he was disappointed by the ruling, but he and his client had not discussed whether to appeal.

“Our argument is this is not a fraud. It’s just two people in a nontraditional marriage,” Lambert said.

Antoinette Janda, who represented herself, did not have a listed phone number and could not be reached for comment.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Instead of walking down the aisle of a church, a former New York couple will traipse down the aisle of a court room to settle a fight over a $48,800 (23,866 pound) diamond engagement ring.

Dean Kuehnen Jr. is suing his ex-fiance, Andria Castellano, to compel her to either return the ring or give him cash — as well as cover his legal fees and costs, according to the complaint filed in New York State Court.

Castellano has threatened to sell or destroy the 3.23-carat ring, even though the couple agreed the ring would be returned to Kuehnen if their engagement was ever broken off, the complaint says.

Both were 21 years old when they became engaged in December last year, but by September this year the wedding was off.

“The sole and exclusive consideration, motivation and reason for buying the ring was the contemplated marriage,” the complaint says.

Attempts to contact Castellano were unsuccessful.

According to the United States’ Emily Post Institute that offers etiquette and manners advice, “if an engagement is broken, the bride should immediately return the ring to her former fiance.”

“The only “but” in this case is if the ring is a family heirloom of the bride’s. She should then keep the ring,” the institute said on its Web site.

LAPEER, Mich. – The Lapeer County sheriff wants to help two bank robbery suspects tie the knot.

“I’ll volunteer to marry them in the jail if they surrender,” Sheriff Ron Kalanquin said Monday. Kalanquin said he wanted the Lapeer couple off the streets before their cash ran out and they attempted another robbery.

A 24-year-old man and a 23-year-old woman are suspected of taking about $5,000 in the Sept. 19 robbery of a Lapeer County Bank & Trust branch in Deerfield Township, about 60 miles north of Detroit.

Detectives determined that the robbery money was used to buy wedding rings, pay back rent and pay the woman’s attorney for work done in a child custody case, The Flint Journal reported.

The couple met after the man was released from the county jail and was introduced to her by another ex-inmate, Kalanquin said.

“We believe they could still be in the area, but could also be somewhere in Michigan or beyond,” Kalanquin said. He appealed to the couple’s relatives and friends to alert police to their whereabouts.

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Brides in Stockholm who want their fathers to walk them down the aisle are likely to be told it can’t be done, as some pastors are refusing to allow the practice they say is sexist, a pastor said on Friday.

“In Sweden we have worked hard in many different ways to eliminate everything that is unequal,” a Lutheran Church vicar in the Stockholm region, Yvonne Hallin, told AFP.

She said she would not allow the custom in her parish, and noted that Stockholm’s bishop issued a recommendation in 2003 that pastors discourage it.

Couples who marry “are equal when it comes to finances, politics, values … but when they come to the church … the woman suddenly turns into a man’s property,” she said.

Hallin said she has informed a father who was to walk his daughter down the aisle on Saturday that he would not be doing so.

The mother of the bride, who was shocked by the news, told Swedish news agency TT that the ceremony would go ahead as planned but that the couple had had to give in to the pastor’s wishes.

“In this case it wasn’t the couple who became angry but the parents,” Hallin said, adding that most people “don’t find it strange.”

She noted that the custom of fathers walking their daughters down the aisle “is not a Swedish tradition. It has been imported from American and British films.”

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) – A Malaysian woman is claiming to have seen the names of Allah and Mohammed spelled out in the entrails of a cow she was butchering, state media reported Tuesday.

Salmah Nayan told Bernama news agency she could decipher the words written in Arabic script among the intestines of the cow, which had been slaughtered ahead of a wedding party.

“I cut those intestines twice. At first I didn’t notice it but after I turned it around a few times it became clear the words ‘Allah’ and ‘Mohammed’ were there,” she said.

Nayan said the divine discovery had attracted more attention than the newlyweds.

The bride’s mother said her family would keep the intestines as a reminder of God’s greatness.

PATNA, India (Reuters) – Villagers at a wedding in eastern India decided the groom had arrived too drunk to get married, and so the bride married the groom’s more sober brother instead, police said on Monday.

“The groom was drunk and had reportedly misbehaved with guests when the bride’s family and local villagers chased him away,” Madho Singh, a senior police officer told Reuters after Sunday’s marriage in a village in Bihar state’s Arwal district.

The younger brother readily agreed to take the groom’s place beside the teenage bride at her family’s invitation, witnesses said.

“The groom apologised for his behaviour, but has been crying that word will spread and he will never get a bride again,” Singh said by phone.

BEIJING (Reuters) – Worried your husband-to-be is already married?

In China you will soon be able to check on a nationwide registry of marriage details, designed to stamp out bigamy, the official Xinhua agency reported late on Tuesday.

The system, recording the date, place and names of every marriage, should be up and running by 2010, Xinhua quoted the Civil Affairs Ministry as saying.

Simplified marriage procedures have led to a rise in bigamy in recent years, Xinhua said.

China is in the middle of a crackdown on official corruption, with those who take extra wives and mistresses being targeted.

SAINT PETERSBURG, Russia (AFP) – In a hurry to get hitched? How about boarding the “wedding train” being offered by a Saint Petersburg rail company to start your married life?

The rail project is to be unveiled by the Oktyabrskaya railway company at a ceremony in Russia’s romantic former capital Saint Petersburg on Wednesday.

“Newly weds will have the chance to marry, celebrate their wedding, and go on honeymoon on their own wedding train,” the company said in a press release.

Holding the ceremony in the specially designed chapel provided on board could mean a slightly jolting start to married life.

But the company insisted in a press release that there would be plenty of space for guests and none of the metallic squeals and painful bumps that sometimes accompany Russian train journeys.

With a reception carriage, an entertainments carriage and two restaurant cars there will be room for 100 guests, the company said.

A video facility will be in place for relaying congratulations from absent friends.

And if the newly-weds tire of the company they have brought with them, they can at least retreat to their own “Grand De Luxe” compartment, tastefully decorated with flowers and balloons, to continue their roll through Russia’s vast expanses.

ROME (Reuters) – Often seen as mommy’s boys, Italian men are now letting their mothers choose their future wives live on television.

Italy’s state TV aired the first episode of a new reality show this week in which the mothers of five single men have to pick out prospective brides from a selection of candidates.

Critics said “Perfect Bride” was both insulting to women and showed Italian TV — already packed with other reality formats such as Big Brother and Celebrity Island — falling to new depths of banality.

In the first episode, the jury of mothers — called only by their first names such as “Mamma Rosa” and “Mamma Ambra” — quizzed 18 hopefuls about their suitability as wives.

From next week the mothers will have to live in a Big Brother-style house with their potential daughters-in-law, seeing first hand how they deal with household chores. Viewers will be encouraged to vote off the candidates they dislike.

Mamma Teresa said she was looking for “a simple, intelligent, classy girl” for her son Claudio. “I would like someone who’s not too ostentatious and who knows how to take care of the family,” she said on the program’s Web site.

Claudio, viewers learn, is “a really capable person, very affectionate with his family,” but suffers from one defect common to many Italian bachelors: “He has too many girlfriends! I want to find him his ultimate woman.”

In a country where it is normal for unmarried men to live with their parents into their 30s and “mamma mia!” (my mommy) is a common exclamation, the Italian mother figure is revered by society but often feared by girlfriends and wives.

TV critics said the program exploited the stereotype of the overbearing mamma.

“It’s the most grandiose, caricatural, corrosive demolition of the image of the Italian mamma,” said Italy’s leading daily Corriere della Sera.

The show’s debut comes as RAI is debating the future of reality shows which the state broadcaster’s chairman, Claudio Petruccioli, said were “unrealistic and coercive, leading inevitably to unreasonable if not degrading behavior.”

Petruccioli failed in his bid to scrap the formats which have become a staple both for RAI and Mediaset, the broadcaster owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

La Repubblica daily said Prefect Bride had an out-dated vision of women’s role in society. “State TV is going too far in its failure to limit the rubbish, the rudeness, the lying, the lack of manners and the wiping out of social changes which happened 50 years ago,” it said.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican men who display extreme jealousy or avoid sex with their wives could be tried in court and punished under a new law, the special prosecutor for crimes against women told a local newspaper on Friday.

Men who phone their wives every half hour to check up on them, constantly suspect them of infidelity or try to control the way they dress are committing the crime of jealousy, special prosecutor Alicia Elena Perez Duarte told Excelsior newspaper.

Those who stop talking to their wives, avoid sex or try to convince suspicious spouses they are “crazy” even if they are caught red-handed having an affair, are guilty of indifference, she said.

Men found guilty of jealousy or indifference could face up to five years in prison, the newspaper said. Mexico’s individual states will determine the punishments, it said.

The progressive new law was passed this month to protect women from domestic violence.

In Mexico, about 75 percent of all murdered women are killed by their husbands, Perez Duarte said.

“If we do not stop this from the beginning, it turns into beatings, and the beatings turn into more beatings and rape, until it gets out of hand, and whoops, she died,” she told the paper.

Perez Duarte said the law would be a weapon that women could employ to level the playing field with abusive men.

“Men ought not to feel discriminated against,” she told Excelsior.

Perez Duarte said indifference, jealousy or lack of love were crimes against women just as much as physical violence.

“Jealousy produces a particular type of stress in the person that comes up against it,” she said. “It is exactly the same. They are wounds, psychological scars identical to physical scars.”

VATICAN CITY (Reuters Life!) – Smoke got in his eyes. Too much of it, so he asked the Roman Catholic Church to annul his marriage when his wife refused to kick the nicotine habit.

That is just one of the, well, hazy cases that wound up before the Vatican’s Sacra Romana Rota, a top court which hears the most complicated of marriage annulment requests.

Others included women who wanted annulments because their husbands were “mammoni” (mamma’s boys) who were not able to cut the psychological umbilical cord with their mothers even though they are in their 30s or 40s or beyond.

The cases have been reported in the Italian media since last Saturday, when Pope Benedict delivered an address to the court’s judges asking them to be more careful in granting annulments.

An annulment in the Roman Catholic Church is an official ruling that a marriage was never valid, that it effectively never existed.

Among other reasons, annulments can be granted because of psychological immaturity of one or both partners at the time of the marriage, a hidden factor not known to one partner, problems of consent, lack of sexual consummation and forced marriages.

In the case of the non-smoking husband, the health and physical fitness enthusiast asked his girlfriend to marry him on condition she would eventually quit smoking.

She said yes and after they tied the knot she tried her best but her addiction was stronger than her and the marriage went up in smoke — at least from the husband’s point of view.

A first diocesan marriage tribunal granted him the annulment but a second tribunal overturned that decision. They are still married in the eyes of the Church and the case is now before the Vatican’s Rota.

MAMMA BOYS

The odd cases that made it to the Vatican court were contained in an annual report prepared by the judges for their yearly meeting with the Pope.

Others included cases where one of the partners, usually the men, had a “morbid dependence” on their parents — a not uncommon occurrence in Italy where many men tend to stay at home until they marry even if they make top-dollar salaries.

One other case involved a man who asked for an annulment because his wife stopped taking care of herself and her looks after she got married and he considered himself “tricked” into marrying a person who turned out to be different.

Although divorce has been legal in Roman Catholic Italy for more than 35 years, it is still seen by many as a social stigma and some prefer to have their marriages annulled so they can remarry in Church.

Thousands of annulments are decided locally by diocesan tribunals around the world each year. The Vatican court rules on several hundred of the most complicated, many of them appeals.

In 1992 the Vatican granted an annulment to Princess Caroline of Monaco, which made her 1978 marriage to Frenchman Phillippe Junot never valid in the eyes of the Church.

The Church never recognized her divorce from Junot in 1980 or her civil marriage in 1983 to Italian Stefano Casiraghi, who was killed in an offshore boating accident in 1990.

DETROIT, United States (AFP) – Philanderers beware: spouses caught cheating in Michigan could end up spending the rest of their life in prison.

And not the emotional kind.

The state’s appeals court recently ruled that extramarital flings can be prosecuted as first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in jail.

“We cannot help but question whether the Legislature actually intended the result we reach here today,” Judge William Murphy wrote in a unanimous Court of Appeals panel, “but we are curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion.”

“Technically,” he added, “any time a person engages in sexual penetration in an adulterous relationship, he or she is guilty of CSC I,” the most serious sexual assault charge in the state’s criminal code.

Michigan still lists adultery as a felony, although no one has been convicted of the offense since 1971.

Nobody really expects prosecutors to go after cheating spouses. But the ruling has the local legal community twittering about its genuine intended target.

One theory floating around the courthouse is that the judges were taking a jab at the state Supreme Court, which has decreed that judges must interpret statutory language adopted by the Legislature literally, whatever the consequences.

Many other states allow judges to reject a literal interpretation if they believe it would lead to an absurd result.

Judge Murphy wrote that he encouraged “the Legislature to take a second look at the statutory language if they are troubled by our ruling.”

A spokesman for the attoney general, who publicly admitted to adultery in November, declined to say whether they would press for legislative amendments to make it clear that only violent felonies involving an unwilling victim could trigger a first-degree CSC charge.

“This is so bizarre that it doesn’t even merit a response,” Rusty Hill said.

The appeals court decision involved a man convicted of trading prescription painkillers for sex.

In an attempt to increase his jail time, prosecutors used an obscure provision of the state’s criminal law to charge him with criminal sexual conduct, which occurs whenever “sexual penetration occurs under circumstances involving the commission of any other felony.

LAGOS (AFP) – Samuel Akinbode Sadela, Nigeria’s oldest preacher at 107, said he derived his strength from God after marrying a 30-year woman.

“The Lord is my strength. I am very strong and energetic,” they quoted him as saying after the wedding in Lagos.

Sadela, founder of Gospel Apostolic Church, has been on the pulpit for 75 years.

Sadela first got married in 1934, and the marriage lasted for 21 years, but none of the couple’s seven children lived beyond their infancy.

A second marriage, consummated in 1965, was blessed with four children, but only two survived. His second wife died in 2001.

And then he met the new woman of his life, 77 years his junior.

The marriage with Christiana Sadela is “a fulfilment of the scripture and worthy of thanksgiving and appreciation to God”, his church said in a statement.

“Nothing is impossible for God,” it said.

Ya we know where and how he got his strength, dont we..;)

VIENNA (AFP) – An Austrian couple have had their marriage postponed for 10 weeks because the bride said “no” as a joke when the registrar asked during the civil ceremony whether she would take this man to be her husband, a newspaper reported.

Despite the entreaties of the bride, who said immediately she had just meant it in jest, the officiating registrar at once broke off the heavily attended ceremony in the town of Steyr, said the newspaper Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten.

Austrian regulations stipulate that there must be a postponement of at least 10 weeks should one of the parties respond in the negative when asked during the ceremony whether he or she consents to the union.

The newspaper explained that this was to ensure that a non-consenting party did not withdraw the reply “no” and consent to the union under pressure from his or her family, the newspaper explained.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Nearly two-thirds of young Indian men expect the woman they marry to be a virgin, but nearly half have had sex with prostitutes, according to a poll.

The survey of more than 2,500 men aged between 16 and 25 conducted by India Today magazine across 11 cities found that 49 percent claimed to have had sex with a sex worker while 37 percent said they had had a homosexual experience.

But 63 percent of young men in conservative India said they expected the women they married to be a virgin.

The average age of their first sexual encounter appears to be falling — to 18 years from 23 in a similar survey two years ago, but condom use is on the rise, the report said. More than half of the men surveyed said they always used a condom.

Fourteen percent of those surveyed said they had had sex with a member of their own family.

HELL, Mich. – Catherine Greene was admittedly a little nervous when she said “I do” to fiance Nicholas Doubleday during a Halloween-themed wedding ceremony in this unusually named hamlet. “It was her idea,” Doubleday said. “When I asked her to marry me, she said she wanted the wedding in Hell.”

The couple live near San Diego and are planning to relocate to Michigan. They haven’t ruled out moving to Hell, which has about 250 people and is 45 miles west of Detroit.

The bride, a registered nurse, was dressed in black and wore vampire teeth during Tuesday’s nuptials. She walked down the lantern-lit, pumpkin-lined aisle in cadence with a funeral dirge instead of the “Wedding March.”

The groom, who hopes to become a history teacher, was a knight clad in 80 pounds of armor.

“I will have these wonderful memories forever,” Greene told The Ann Arbor News.

It was the second such ceremony at John Colone’s Hell Village Chapel, a tiny building that stands behind his Screams Ice Cream & Halloween Store.

“This is great,” Colone said. “I love the joy and the laughter we can bring into people’s lives.”

The maid of honor, Terri Dunham of Oceanside, Calif., was dressed as an angel in white. Greene’s bridesmaids were dressed as medieval princesses.

“Having the wedding here totally makes sense,” Dunham said. “I’ve known Cathy since we were in sixth grade and she’s always been extreme and offbeat.

“Everyone wants a special and unique wedding. This will be a great story to tell to their grandchildren.”

Greene and Doubleday met in 2003 in Alaska, where she was going to college and he was in the Air Force. Their ghoulish wedding day was their third trip to Hell together.

LACONIA, N.H. – Police said a couple were arguing about their marriage when the wife grabbed an ax and charged at her husband, chasing him around the house.

The ax is considered a collector’s item and is used for display, but investigators said it has a very sharp blade and is capable of causing serious injury or death.

Linda Masse, 50, defended herself in court Monday and called the ax a toy.

“I didn’t threaten him or to kill him or anything,” she said.

Investigators said that the couple had been drinking, and Masse’s husband told her that he wanted to leave her. The argument then became violent, police said.

Police said that while chasing her husband, Masse destroyed several things inside their home, including a glass door and his car.

Her husband ran to a neighbor’s house, where he locked the door and called police.

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Las Vegas bills itself as “the wedding capital of the world,” but late-night revellers who decide they want to tie the knot now must wait until morning.

The county’s marriage-licence office, as of Wednesday, will be closed between midnight and 8 a.m., when much of Las Vegas is still very much alive.

“It’s one of the things Vegas is known for — you can gamble, get drunk and get married all in the middle of the night,” said Jay DeLeon, manager of the Graceland Wedding Chapel — where Elvis impersonators make special nuptial appearances.

Probably the best known late-night marriage seeker was pop star Britney Spears, who shocked the world in 2004 when she married a childhood friend just before sunrise in Las Vegas. That union was quickly annulled.

People can still get married around the clock at one of the city’s few all-night wedding chapels; it will just take a bit more planning to obtain the $55 licence (29 pounds), said Cheryl Vernon, who supervises the marriage-services office in the county clerk’s department.

Vernon said the new office hours were not the result of a push to curb irresponsible life decisions, but simply because too few early-morning customers — about 15-30 people — came in to justify a late-night shift. About 300 to 500 people seek licenses on a normal shift, she said.

Last year the office issued 122,259 marriage licences.

Vernon said most late-night licence seekers have been jet-lagged travellers lugging suitcases and trying to avoid daytime lines, rather than spontaneous celebrants. Still, there were notable exceptions.

“Yes, we did have our few — like Britney (Spears). She came in at five in the morning,” Vernon said.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Police in the German city of Aachen received an unusual call for help late Wednesday when a woman telephoned to complain her husband was not fulfilling his sexual obligations.

After the couple had been sleeping in separate beds for several months without intimate contact, the 44-year-old woman woke the husband, 45, in the middle of the night and demanded he satisfy her needs, police spokesman Paul Kemen said Thursday.

When her advances were refused, a row broke out and she called the police and asked them to intervene, he added.

“The police officials did not feel able to resolve the dispute, let alone issue any kind of official order,” Kemen said.

“And because no crime or infringement could be identified, all they could do was file a report in case intervention might be required at a later date,” he added.

ROME, Georgia (Reuters) – A young man’s plan to propose to his girlfriend on a small chartered plane almost ended in disaster when the plane crashed and the engagement ring was lost in the wreckage.

Adam Sutton, 19, told Erika Brussee, 18, they were going on a date to the movies but instead took her to the airport in Rome, a U.S. town in northwest Georgia, for a chartered flight on Friday, according to the WSB-TV Web site.

The plan was for family members to hold up a large sign on the ground with the words “will you marry me” on it. But Brussee only saw the word “marry” because part of the sign was obscured before the plane, flying slowly at low altitude, stalled and crashed on the tarmac at Rome’s airport.

The couple were not seriously hurt, Mike Mathews, airport manager at Richard B. Russell Regional Airport, told Reuters on Monday.

Brussee finally said “yes” to the proposal in the ambulance, Mathews said, but Sutton wasn’t able to give her the ring. Only the ring’s box could be found after the crash.

The plane’s pilot was knocked unconscious by the crash and Sutton had to pull him from the plane.

ROME (Reuters) – Forcing your wife to kneel down and scrub the house floor clean is a crime because it amounts to mistreatment, Italy’s highest appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

The court upheld a conviction for ill-treatment handed down to a man who was left by his wife after what she said were years of abuse and threats.

“The husband humiliated and burdened her in every way, to the point of forcing her to clean the floor on her knees as a punishment for the insufficient dedication that in his view the woman put into housework,” the court said.

The man was sentenced to pay unspecified compensation to his wife, who has since returned to live with her parents, and provide child support for their son.

Italy’s Cassation court is often called on to settle what might seem like unusual legal disputes for a high court.

The floor-scrubbing verdict came one day after it ruled that calling someone a “faggot” is a punishable insult. Both sentences will go some way to appeasing critics of the court, who say its judges are mostly conservative macho men.

In two recent controversial judgments, the court ruled that calling a foreigner “dirty negro” is not necessarily racist and that sexually abusing a teenager is less serious a crime if the girl is not a virgin.

In recent years it has returned a verdict that an “isolated and impulsive” pat on a woman’s bottom at work did not constitute sexual harassment, and stated that a woman could not have been raped because she was wearing skin-tight jeans.

BEIJING (Reuters) – Fighting people smugglers and drug runners is old hat for China’s border police who now have a new duty — defusing marital squabbles and other disputes.

Police officials said on Tuesday that the policy — called “love the people, consolidate the borders” — made perfect sense, as a happy populace that trusts the authorities helps make China’s frontiers safer.

“It provides a protective screen for the social and economic development of the country in this important strategic period,” Chen Weiming, director of the Ministry of Public Security’s frontier bureau, told a news conference.

The police along China’s 22,000-km (13,700-mile) land border and in coastal areas were involved in everything from advising Inner Mongolian herders on when to get the best prices for wool to sorting out family strife, Chen said.

That even extended to helping stop a quarrelling couple from seeking divorce, he said.

But Chen, who spent much of the hour-long event talking up his force’s social work record, was tight-lipped about more sensitive topics, such as the flow of asylum seekers from North Korea.

“The situation along the North Korea border is good, though there are foreigners and illegal immigrants,” he said. “Our staff and soldiers are working on it and it will be dealt with properly.”

SONKAJARVI, Finland (Reuters) – Finishing upside down clinging to a man’s back may not be the most graceful way of winning gold, but it sure helped Sandra Kullas and Margo Uusorg to the world wife-carrying crown on Saturday.

The Estonians were among 40 pairs from eight countries who competed in the annual event in Sonkajarvi, in central Finland.

They raced along a 250-meter track, complete with pools and hurdles, with the men running or walking and carrying the women on their backs.

The championship, being held for the 11th time, evokes the legend of robber Rosvo-Ronkainen who made people trying to join his gang run through a forest carrying heavy sacks.

Uusorg, 26, finished in 56.9 seconds, a world record, while Kullas, 19, clung to his back upside down with her legs around his neck. They beat Uusorg’s bother Madis by 3 seconds.

“I was a bit nervous before the start, but when I started running it felt fine,” Margo Uusorg said after the race. “I wanted to jump over the hurdles, but I was afraid I might fall and get penalty seconds.”

It was Uusorg’s fifth world-championship and he said it might be his last.

The winning Estonians received laptop computers and Kullas’ weight, 49 kg, in beer.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – A man who apparently severed his penis in an attempt to convince his wife that he was faithful to her was recovering after surgery to reattach the organ at a northern Malaysian hospital, a news report said Tuesday.

The 41-year-old man, who was not identified, got into an argument last Friday with his wife, who found a text message on his mobile phone from another woman. The man was heard by his son shouting that he wanted to prove he was not having an affair, the New Straits Times reported.

The assertion was followed by loud screams and the man emerged from his room bleeding profusely, his 14-year-old son quoted as saying. His wife rushed him to hospital.

MIAMI (Reuters) – Eight U.S. sailors at a Florida naval station fraudulently married Polish and Romanian women in order to collect extra housing allowances, according to federal charges filed on Tuesday.

The women did not live with their Navy husbands, but used the sham marriages to apply for U.S. citizenship, U.S. Attorney Paul Perez said in a news release.

The sailors, seven of whom are still in the Navy, were all stationed at the Mayport naval station in northeast Florida.

They were charged with conspiracy, marriage fraud and making false claims to the government to collect $35,000 worth of extra housing allowances.

The tax-free allowances for off-base housing are based partly on marital status and number of dependents.

“They only married them so they could collect that money,” said Steve Cole, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The women were also charged with marriage fraud and authorities were investigating whether they violated immigration laws, he said.

A federal probe began in September when a sailor told the Naval Criminal Investigative Service that another sailor offered him the extra housing allowance in exchange for marrying a Polish woman. He said the sailor who acted as matchmaker collected $6,000 from the bride.

The sailors were assigned to the USS John F. Kennedy, an aircraft carrier, and the USS Simpson, a frigate. Five assigned to the Kennedy were in custody on Tuesday and arrest warrants were issued for the others. If convicted, they face up to five years in prison on each count.

SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korean men in rural areas are having a tough time wooing local women with prospects of spending a lifetime with them on the farm and are increasingly turning to brokers to find foreign brides.

In 2005, more than one in three men in rural areas married a women from overseas, mostly from China or Vietnam, figures released this week by South Korea’s National Statistical Office (NSO) showed.

“The rates of international marriages have increased because the values of Koreans have become more liberal,” said Park Kyung-ae, an official with the NSO.

Several rural counties have launched programmes to provide financial support for South Korean men to help them pay for mail-order brides.

They have also set up programmes to help foreign spouses adjust to a new life in the country.

One of the biggest growth trends in almost completely homogeneous South Korea last year was finding a foreign spouse, with 14 percent of all weddings in 2005 being international marriages, the statistics office said.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – A Muslim couple in India has been told by local Islamic leaders they must separate after the husband “divorced” his wife in his sleep, the Press Trust of India reported.

Sohela Ansari told friends that her husband Aftab had uttered the word “talaq,” or divorce, three times in his sleep, according to the report published in newspapers Monday.

When local Islamic leaders got to hear, they said Aftab’s words constituted a divorce under an Islamic procedure known as “triple talaq.” The couple, married for 11 years with three children, were told they had to split.

The religious leaders ruled that if the couple wanted to remarry they would have to wait at least 100 days. Sohela would also have to spend a night with another man and be divorced by him in turn.

The couple, who live in the eastern state of West Bengal, have refused to obey the order and the issue has been referred to a local family counseling center.

India’s minority Muslim population is governed by Islamic personal laws on issues such as marriage, divorce and property inheritance.

“This is a totally unnecessary controversy and the local ‘community leaders’ or whosoever has said it are totally ignorant of Islamic law,” said Zafarul-Islam Khan, an Islamic scholar and editor of The Milli Gazette, a popular Muslim newspaper.

“The law clearly says any action under compulsion or in a state of intoxication has no effect. The case of someone uttering something while asleep falls under this category and will have no impact whatsoever,” Khan told Reuters.

WEST CHESTER, Pa. – A man married his bride in a courtroom immediately after he was sentenced to at least a decade in prison on a murder conspiracy charge.

Cassandre LaFortune, dressed in a white gown, listened to Akram “Ish” Jones enter his Alford plea Tuesday. She then stepped forward to marry him.

When the judge asked her if she knew what she was getting into, Akram Jones politely interrupted and said, “your honor, I don’t mean to be rude, but she proposed to me.”

Jones was wearing a gray suit, tie and shackles on his wrists and ankles, which sheriff’s deputies removed before the wedding ceremony. After the ceremony, the newlyweds posed for photos with the 17 family members in attendance, including the couple’s mothers and Jones’ 4-year-old son.

Jones, 26, entered the Alford plea, in which he did not admit guilt but acknowledged there was enough evidence to convict him, on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder. He was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in state prison for plotting to kill Terrance M. Maxie.

On Oct. 4, 2000, Jones and two other men allegedly planned to kill Maxie at a South Coatesville bar, but failed when Jones shot himself in the hand before they could try. Maxie, 27, was shot in the back as he left the same bar nine days later, allegedly by the other two men.

Jones also pleaded guilty in two other pending cases — one for assaulting another prisoner, the other a riot charge resulting from an inmate uprising at Chester County Prison. Sentences for those crimes will be served concurrently.

LaFortune said she and Jones had been dating for seven years. She plans to move close to whichever state prison he is assigned to.

Defense attorney Brenda L. Jones said her client asked for the wedding to take place after he entered the pleas.

“He really loves her,” she said. “Despite the charges, he’s really not a bad person. He just got caught up in it.”

TOKYO (Reuters) – A middle-aged Tokyo man found to be living with 10 younger women said he attracted them by reciting an incantation that came to him in a dream.

The 57-year-old man’s unusual living arrangements came to light when another woman complained to police that he had threatened her after she refused to join his harem, Kyodo news agency said Wednesday.

“I had a dream that told me I would become attractive to women if I recited a particular incantation,” it quoted the man as saying.

A rapid series of weddings and divorces left the man with a large group of ex-wives, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who shared his surname and continued to live with him.

SEOUL (Reuters) – A rural province in South Korea plans to give financial aid to help lonely male farmers pay for mail-order brides from overseas.

South Kyongsang province plans to start a trial programme in which it will give 6 million won (3,500 pounds) to male farmers who marry foreign women, an official said on Tuesday.

South Korean farmers have been turning to brides from other parts of Asia in recent years after struggling to woo local women, who are often less than enthralled with the prospect of rural life.

“Young men in the countryside have a hard time finding brides and they started to look elsewhere,” said Ryu Kum-ju, an agricultural policy official for the province, located in the southern part of the country.

“We decided to give financial support to those men for a trial period,” Ryu said by telephone.

The province also plans to increase courses for foreign brides to help them adjust to life in South Korea.

The local government estimates it costs about 12 million won (12,000 pounds) for a farmer to pay all the fees and travel required to find a bride overseas.

The number of South Korean men who have married foreign women has rocketed in recent years. It hit 25,594 in 2004, more than double the 11,017 in 2002, according to data from the Korea National Statistical Office.

China provides most of the brides, while Vietnam is second on the list